Face plays an important role in human's visual perception, and reconstructing perceived faces from brain activities is challenging because of its difficulty in extracting high-level features and maintaining consistency of multiple face attributes, such as expression, identity, gender, etc. In this study, we proposed a novel reconstruction framework, which we called Double-Flow GAN, that can enhance the capability of discriminator and handle imbalances in images from certain domains that are too easy for generators. We also designed a pretraining process that uses features extracted from images as conditions for making it possible to pretrain the conditional reconstruction model from fMRI in a larger pure image dataset. Moreover, we developed a simple pretrained model to perform fMRI alignment to alleviate the problem of cross-subject reconstruction due to the variations of brain structure among different subjects. We conducted experiments by using our proposed method and state-of-the-art reconstruction models. Our results demonstrated that our method showed significant reconstruction performance, outperformed the previous reconstruction models, and exhibited a good generation ability.
A central challenge in the verification of quantum computers is benchmarking their performance as a whole and demonstrating their computational capabilities. In this work, we find a universal model of quantum computation, Bell sampling, that can be used for both of those tasks and thus provides an ideal stepping stone towards fault-tolerance. In Bell sampling, we measure two copies of a state prepared by a quantum circuit in the transversal Bell basis. We show that the Bell samples are classically intractable to produce and at the same time constitute what we call a circuit shadow: from the Bell samples we can efficiently extract information about the quantum circuit preparing the state, as well as diagnose circuit errors. In addition to known properties that can be efficiently extracted from Bell samples, we give two new and efficient protocols, a test for the depth of the circuit and an algorithm to estimate a lower bound to the number of T gates in the circuit. With some additional measurements, our algorithm learns a full description of states prepared by circuits with low T-count.
The emergence of industrial-scale speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper and USM, trained on 1M hours of weakly labelled and 12M hours of audio only proprietary data respectively, has led to a stronger need for large scale public ASR corpora and competitive open source pipelines. Unlike the said models, large language models are typically based on Transformer decoders, and it remains unclear if decoder-only models trained on public data alone can deliver competitive performance. In this work, we investigate factors such as choice of training datasets and modeling components necessary for obtaining the best performance using public English ASR corpora alone. Our Decoder-Only Transformer for ASR (DOTA) model comprehensively outperforms the encoder-decoder open source replication of Whisper (OWSM) on nearly all English ASR benchmarks and outperforms Whisper large-v3 on 7 out of 15 test sets. We release our codebase and model checkpoints under permissive license.
Multi-view multi-human association and tracking (MvMHAT), is a new but important problem for multi-person scene video surveillance, aiming to track a group of people over time in each view, as well as to identify the same person across different views at the same time, which is different from previous MOT and multi-camera MOT tasks only considering the over-time human tracking. This way, the videos for MvMHAT require more complex annotations while containing more information for self learning. In this work, we tackle this problem with a self-supervised learning aware end-to-end network. Specifically, we propose to take advantage of the spatial-temporal self-consistency rationale by considering three properties of reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity. Besides the reflexivity property that naturally holds, we design the self-supervised learning losses based on the properties of symmetry and transitivity, for both appearance feature learning and assignment matrix optimization, to associate the multiple humans over time and across views. Furthermore, to promote the research on MvMHAT, we build two new large-scale benchmarks for the network training and testing of different algorithms. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our method. We have released the benchmark and code to the public.
Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommendation has recently garnered considerable attention, where fine-tuning plays a key role in LLMs' adaptation. However, the cost of fine-tuning LLMs on rapidly expanding recommendation data limits their practical application. To address this challenge, few-shot fine-tuning offers a promising approach to quickly adapt LLMs to new recommendation data. We propose the task of data pruning for efficient LLM-based recommendation, aimed at identifying representative samples tailored for LLMs' few-shot fine-tuning. While coreset selection is closely related to the proposed task, existing coreset selection methods often rely on suboptimal heuristic metrics or entail costly optimization on large-scale recommendation data. To tackle these issues, we introduce two objectives for the data pruning task in the context of LLM-based recommendation: 1) high accuracy aims to identify the influential samples that can lead to high overall performance; and 2) high efficiency underlines the low costs of the data pruning process. To pursue the two objectives, we propose a novel data pruning method based on two scores, i.e., influence score and effort score, to efficiently identify the influential samples. Particularly, the influence score is introduced to accurately estimate the influence of sample removal on the overall performance. To achieve low costs of the data pruning process, we use a small-sized surrogate model to replace LLMs to obtain the influence score. Considering the potential gap between the surrogate model and LLMs, we further propose an effort score to prioritize some hard samples specifically for LLMs. Empirical results on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. In particular, the proposed method uses only 2% samples to surpass the full data fine-tuning, reducing time costs by 97%.
Finding obstacle-free paths in unknown environments is a big navigation issue for visually impaired people and autonomous robots. Previous works focus on obstacle avoidance, however they do not have a general view of the environment they are moving in. New devices based on computer vision systems can help impaired people to overcome the difficulties of navigating in unknown environments in safe conditions. In this work it is proposed a combination of sensors and algorithms that can lead to the building of a navigation system for visually impaired people. Based on traditional systems that use RGB-D cameras for obstacle avoidance, it is included and combined the information of a fish-eye camera, which will give a better understanding of the user's surroundings. The combination gives robustness and reliability to the system as well as a wide field of view that allows to obtain many information from the environment. This combination of sensors is inspired by human vision where the center of the retina (fovea) provides more accurate information than the periphery, where humans have a wider field of view. The proposed system is mounted on a wearable device that provides the obstacle-free zones of the scene, allowing the planning of trajectories for people guidance.
Lattices are architected metamaterials whose properties strongly depend on their geometrical design. The analogy between lattices and graphs enables the use of graph neural networks (GNNs) as a faster surrogate model compared to traditional methods such as finite element modelling. In this work we present a higher-order GNN model trained to predict the fourth-order stiffness tensor of periodic strut-based lattices. The key features of the model are (i) SE(3) equivariance, and (ii) consistency with the thermodynamic law of conservation of energy. We compare the model to non-equivariant models based on a number of error metrics and demonstrate the benefits of the encoded equivariance and energy conservation in terms of predictive performance and reduced training requirements.
Adversarial generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), are widely applied for generating various types of data, i.e., images, text, and audio. Accordingly, its promising performance has led to the GAN-based adversarial attack methods in the white-box and black-box attack scenarios. The importance of transferable black-box attacks lies in their ability to be effective across different models and settings, more closely aligning with real-world applications. However, it remains challenging to retain the performance in terms of transferable adversarial examples for such methods. Meanwhile, we observe that some enhanced gradient-based transferable adversarial attack algorithms require prolonged time for adversarial sample generation. Thus, in this work, we propose a novel algorithm named GE-AdvGAN to enhance the transferability of adversarial samples whilst improving the algorithm's efficiency. The main approach is via optimising the training process of the generator parameters. With the functional and characteristic similarity analysis, we introduce a novel gradient editing (GE) mechanism and verify its feasibility in generating transferable samples on various models. Moreover, by exploring the frequency domain information to determine the gradient editing direction, GE-AdvGAN can generate highly transferable adversarial samples while minimizing the execution time in comparison to the state-of-the-art transferable adversarial attack algorithms. The performance of GE-AdvGAN is comprehensively evaluated by large-scale experiments on different datasets, which results demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm. The code for our algorithm is available at: //github.com/LMBTough/GE-advGAN
Scheduling real-time tasks that utilize GPUs with analyzable guarantees poses a significant challenge due to the intricate interaction between CPU and GPU resources, as well as the complex GPU hardware and software stack. While much research has been conducted in the real-time research community, several limitations persist, including the absence or limited availability of preemption, extended blocking times, and/or the need for extensive modifications to program code. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques, namely the kernel thread and IOCTL-based approaches, to enable preemptive priority-based scheduling for real-time GPU tasks. Our approaches exert control over GPU context scheduling at the device driver level and enable preemptive GPU scheduling based on task priorities. The kernel thread-based approach achieves this without requiring modifications to user-level programs, while the IOCTL-based approach needs only a single macro at the boundaries of GPU access segments. In addition, we provide a comprehensive response time analysis that takes into account overlaps between different task segments, mitigating pessimism in worst-case estimates. Through empirical evaluations and case studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in improving taskset schedulability and timeliness of real-time tasks. The results highlight significant improvements over prior work, with up to 40\% higher schedulability, while also achieving predictable worst-case behavior on Nvidia Jetson embedded platforms.
Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.
Although measuring held-out accuracy has been the primary approach to evaluate generalization, it often overestimates the performance of NLP models, while alternative approaches for evaluating models either focus on individual tasks or on specific behaviors. Inspired by principles of behavioral testing in software engineering, we introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models. CheckList includes a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types that facilitate comprehensive test ideation, as well as a software tool to generate a large and diverse number of test cases quickly. We illustrate the utility of CheckList with tests for three tasks, identifying critical failures in both commercial and state-of-art models. In a user study, a team responsible for a commercial sentiment analysis model found new and actionable bugs in an extensively tested model. In another user study, NLP practitioners with CheckList created twice as many tests, and found almost three times as many bugs as users without it.